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Hospital marketing is competitive, especially if you’re in an urban setting where there are multiple hospitals to choose from – and a wealth of private practitioners, too.

Structuring your campaign the right way goes a long way toward capturing market share and increasing your patient flow.

Here are three key ways you can prepare a top-notch hospital marketing campaign, no matter your competitive situation.

Understand Your Market Well

A lot of marketing campaigns are built on intuition and going by your gut. A precious few are based on solid, tangible market knowledge.

The best way to understand your market is through market research. Market research lets you get inside the minds of potential patients. You’ll learn what they value in a doctor or a hospital, their key decision-making factors, and how they emotionally react to messages, branding elements, and the like.

You can use this research to create patient personas that help you pinpoint the demographic and psychographic elements of a typical patient, so you can better tailor your key messages.

You’ll also learn more about where your patients are and how to reach them, which lets you choose your channels wisely.

Prioritize Your Objectives

A hospital marketing campaign needs to be well-structured. But, this can be challenging since structure implies prioritization – given limited resources – and yet there are so many service lines to consider.

Since you have a limited budget, you’ll need to figure out a priority list. That list could shift and change as the year progresses, which is fine, but you need some idea of how you’ll allocate your limited resources.

Some of this is a business decision the hospital administration will have to make based on their patient growth targets. Other portions will be based on revenue goals; some service lines may have more revenue potential or higher profit margin than others.

You’ll have to determine which objectives are most important so you can structure your campaign appropriately.

Tie Everything Together

No matter what you do – post on social media, run PPC ads, buy billboards, take out print ads, run commercials on TV and radio – you’ll benefit from tying these various tactics together.

This is where the campaign-style format works best. A campaign ties everything around a central theme. The theme is replicated in each channel with each tactic, so there’s a unified message. This is much better than a person seeing 10 different messages from 10 different touch-points for your hospital.

Choosing the campaign-style format for your marketing strategy will help you better organize and allocate your resources. It’ll also make your efforts more successful.

Following these three pieces of advice will help create a more robust hospital marketing strategy that can carve out competitive advantages and win patients.

TotalCom is a full-service hospital marketing and advertising agency that believes in getting great results from telling great stories. Contact us for more information or view our previous work and see what stories we can tell for you.

Are you taking advantage of new opportunities for generating exposure?

When potential patients do not have a recommendation from family or friends on what healthcare professional or facility to use, they typically turn to conducting their own research online. This could entail using anything from search engines to social media – as long as the information they find is trustworthy and extensive.

Ensuring your healthcare facility is listed everywhere that potential patients are searching online is key to driving more traffic to your hospital website and therefore, more foot traffic.

Create content that educates

Creating content that educates is beneficial for SEO, driving long-term traffic from search engines to your website. More importantly, quality content in the form of blog posts, articles and social media helps give value to readers and build trust between your patients and your facility.

Put yourself in the patient’s shoes when you write your material and then ask the following questions:

Can I easily interpret the information?

Are these health terms and definitions understandable, even if I was only 12 years old?

Is the content accurate and informative without being overwhelming?

Is the explanation sufficient?

Are all my questions answered?

Fun with Facts

Consumers like facts, especially in healthcare. Weave facts and statistics into appropriate content to complement the information.

The true beauty, however, is the simplicity. Health facts are short and to the point. They are easy to digest, easy to generate, easy to verify.

Video Marketing is Important

Last, but certainly not least, spend time on video marketing to really stand out. Offer testimonials from your patients. Ensure they are genuinely interested in speaking on your behalf for more authenticity and effectiveness. Create videos to introduce doctors and put a human touch to the faces patients will be seeing.

Utilize YouTube as a hub for your video marketing efforts online. Embed those videos throughout your website. YouTube is a search engine owned by Google, making your uploaded video content discoverable in search results and wherever the video is embedded (like your website.)

Again, just like the written content being produced for your web properties, your video content must educate your audience on your expertise in the healthcare industry.

Marketing for the healthcare industry doesn’t have to be difficult. We just need to think about who the target audience is, understand what information they want and of course how best to reach them. Let us do the thinking for you. Contact TotalCom today to learn more about our healthcare marketing options.

ABOUT JIMMY WARRENEarly to bed, early to rise, work like crazy and advertise! Jimmy Warren is president of TotalCom Marketing Communications with over 30 years experience helping many kinds of businesses build a strong brand. A large portion of that experience is in the healthcare industry. He loves the ‘weird’, interesting and extremely talented people he gets to work with every day – that includes co-workers and clients. Outside of work he enjoys his grand kids, traveling and any kind of good ole fashion Alabama sports. Roll Tide!